Hot on the heels of our recent update to the app, we’re pleased to unveil our new-and-improved design and spam testing page. Not only have we made some rather radical changes to the page layout, but we’ve made it quicker to navigate results and added a whole new email client – the iPad.

Lets walk through some of the changes you will see in your account.

A great new layout

The first thing that you will notice is that we’ve given the look and feel of the design and spam testing page a serious refresh. Not only have we made it much easier to view the design test screenshots available, but we’ve added the spam filter results to the same page. You can still view the reasons for your design failing any of the listed spam filters.

We’ve also made it really easy to toggle between IE and Firefox screenshots for supported webmail clients, using these neat buttons to quickly compare results:

You may have also noticed that we’ve dropped the preview pane views on some of our desktop email client tests. These results were only at very low resolutions and not really indicative of the actual preview pane size most of your subscribers using that client would see. Our advice, if you want something to be instantly visible to most recipients, put it in the top left of your email design.

Finally, if you resize your browser, you will notice that the screenshots also resize to fit the viewable area available. This means a much nicer viewing experience at lower resolutions, so you can spot formatting problems without having to give your horizontal scrollbar a workout.

Zippier results and keyboard shortcuts

While we’re on the topic of getting design and spam tests back to you quickly, you may also note that we’ve sped up the delivery of results yet again. It’s still a convenient opportunity to go make yourself a cup of tea – you will see this tick when design or spam filter results first become available (usually within 1-2 minutes):

As multiple design screenshots become available, you can also toggle between them using the ← and → keys on your keyboard. This means no more awkward clicking and much more rapid review of the screenshots available to you. You can also page through each available result using the previous and next buttons, shown on the right below:

Now showing: iPad test results

Finally, to ensure that we accurately represent the major email clients & devices available today, we’ve added the iPad to our ever-growing suite of design tests. As you may know, there’s a lot of similarity between how HTML email displays on the iPad, iPhone and in Apple Mail (all being Webkit clients), but it’s still a joy to see your design on the iPad’s large display:

A big thank you to everyone who sent in their feedback regarding our design and spam filter tests – we agreed that there had to be a better way to present the results, especially as more and more email clients became available to us. Not only will the revamped page and performance improvements allow this popular tool to scale better, but ultimately we hope it makes email testing a more informative and enjoyable experience for you and your clients.

Kaelig

Nice update, thanks a lot.

The prev/next arrows will be very useful for quickly reviewing the results.

Jake Holman

Been waiting for that progress ba… I mean tick to appear – loved it since I first saw it on Dribbble!

holder10

Looks great! I believe there are many of the recently added e-mail clients missing on the sample test though. Maybe you should update that, could be confusing otherwise (as most people will look there to see which clients are available).

Overall, the new UI is great. It’s just kinda missing that quick at-a-glance view. For the majority of my emails, I used to be able to tell at a glance which email clients were not rendering my email properly. Now I have to scroll through all of them or pick and choose the trickier email clients.

David Greiner

ATripp, thanks for the feedback there. In my personal experience the screenshots were really too small to be able to spot any formatting issues (unless it was causing a huge problem and breaking the entire layout). It was because of this that we skipped the step and made it much easier to browse through the full size results, which is where 99% of the issues are discovered.

holder10

Thanks for updating the sample page!

Did I get it right, that Firefox doesn’t support disabling images in E-Mail? Because you don’t have any previews for that. If so, do you know why it is like that?

And one last thing: I can’t really make out what of the buttons is the active one. The grey one could mean disabled (= not active) or it could mean pressed (= active). I guess it should be the later one, but I think it is confusing and not clear: http://cl.ly/10f5201ef65af27a4641

Cheers,Lennart

Ros Hodgekiss

Hi holder, thank you for your feedback here! Yes, the Firefox webmail tests don’t have an “Images off” mode. These FF screenshots are provided by a 3rd party (Litmus) and the images off versions haven’t ben made available to us as yet. Hopefully this is something that we can get our hands on in the future.

I’ve let the design team know about these quirks in Chrome and the potential confusion the IE/FF buttons are causing – many thanks! This is something we may look at tweaking in a future update.

Thank you again for letting us know!

Andrew Cornett

Wooooo looks awesome!

Yasmin Selhorst

What’s the reason the gmail spam test preview looks differerent than the real e-mail in gmail?

Ros Hodgekiss

Hi Yasmin, the Google Apps flavour of Gmail is used in our test results, therefore the interface is slightly different in appearance from regular Gmail. How the emails render should be the same across both, though. :)

This blog provides general information and discussion about email marketing and related subjects. The content provided in this blog ("Content”), should not be construed as and is not intended to constitute financial, legal or tax advice. You should seek the advice of professionals prior to acting upon any information contained in the Content. All Content is provided strictly “as is” and we make no warranty or representation of any kind regarding the Content.

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